ANNALS OF SCIENCE giving me frogs?' Then he left. He didn't want to hear about frogs." In Bakker's view, what did the dino- saurs in was pestilence and plague, car- rIed across new land bridges that were created by draining seas and shifting continents. "Land bridges appear all over the world at the end of the Cretaceous," he said. "The animals that would move fastest across land bridges are big. And the ones that would move most slowly are small-frogs and salamanders and toads. What would happen if you had fifty species of land animal suddenly meeting one another? You're mixing thousands of diseases. "Talk to anybody in a zoo. Or go to an airport and say you want to bring in a live monkey, a live parrot, and a bunch of lizards from Burma. They'll be quarantined. Why do customs officials and zoo- keepers and wildlife managers know this, and paleontologists don't? Hardly any paleontologist pays any attention to introduced diseases. When faunas mix, things die Historians learned that long ago. "Paleontologists are very fond of in- voking climate: When climate changes, the plants change, and when the plants change, the plant-eaters change, and when the plant-eaters change, the meat-eaters change.' That's what I was taught. But it's not true. The climati- cally sensitive animals, like frogs, are the most stable through evolutionary time. Astonishing. Crocodiles die in cold water long before it freezes. They just lose coördination and drown. They're very climate sensitive, and yet crocodiles have been immune to mass extinction. Go down to Louisiana today and you're still in the Cretaceous. Soft- shelled turtles. Alligators. Aquatic sala- manders. All these animals were around in the Cretaceous. And they're still around! This data's been around since 1880 that crocodiles and turtles and frogs are very stable and dinosaurs and mammoths and sabre-toothed cats are very unstable and suffer extinction. That's a wonderfUl paradox. Why have we ignored it?" I N Michael Crichton's ingenious, megaselling novel "Jurassic Park," a wealthy businessman gets some genetic engineers to make real dinosaurs, and just when he's about to open the world's first dinosaur theme park, on an island off Costa Rica, the dinosaurs prove un- controllable, and the moneygrubbers and the technicians become dinosaur chow. The people who survive are nice. Of course, the moldiest theme in science fiction is that if you tamper with Nature she'll kick your butt. Crichton brings it up to date by warning of the dangers of unregulated genetic-engineering experi- ments; amazingly, even dragging that anvil, the story can make you miss your subway stop. The hero-he saves the children, helps alert the armed forces, and escapes with his lovely assistant- is a dinosaur expert named Alan Grant. The character seems to be a composite, and one of Crichton's models has to have been Bakker. Like Bakker, Grant is a bearded paleontologist associated with a Colo- rado university, as Bakker used to be; a proponent of warm-blooded dinosaurs; a man with "little patience for the aca- demics,,, from whom he distances him- self "in dress and behavior"; the author of a popular dinosaur book, which he il- lustrated himself; and a figure instantly recognizable to young dinosaur fans. Even so, Bakker's influence is more Intellectual than literary: Crichton's dinosaurs are wonderfully Bakkerian. In the novel's most harrowing epi- sode, smallish raptor dinosaurs pursue their human prey like a wo]f pack. They break windows, open doors, track odors, give long chase. They possess stamina and intelligence; they embody dogged- ness. Clearly, these are not reptiles. Without Bakker's view of things, Juras- sic Park might have been a far different place-full of cold-blooded suspense, perhaps, as opposed to warm-blooded action. The paleontologist who bears the strongest resemblance to the character of Grant is John R Homer, the curator of paleontology at Montana State University's Museum of the Rockies, in Bozeman. In the late seventies, Horner discovered mounds containing duckbill- dinosaur eggshell fragments and infant remains at a few sites in northwestern Montana. The mounds were nests, and the nests were often situated in vast colonies, suggesting an unexpectedly high degree of social organization. Sometimes Horner found adult and juvenile bones in a single nest, and he 49 "THE BEST TRAVEL CLOTHING IN THE WORLD" PITY THE PICKPOCKETS! Tilley "Classic Pants". 5 secured or secret pockets. Men's & women's; umpteen sizes. 4 colours. Probably the world's best multipurpose pants! $105 to $123, depending on gzrth and hezght. ';! I Begun as a hobby in January 1980, TILLEY ENDURABLES is considered to make the best travel and adventure clothin g in the world. SIr Edmund HIllary: "] wear it; it's jolly good stuff. 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